Dreams and the Vajrayana

At this stage in my life, I'm not in the habit of remembering my dreams, but I had a pretty vivid one last night. I was looking through my grandmother's old apartment at various artifacts, missing my grandmother. I recall seeing a wooden ipad with a completely transparent screen. In fact, kind of like an empty picture frame, but maybe with electronics. At some point, I realized I was dreaming and it occurred to me to try to dream my grandmother into existence. I saw a movement in the door, and excitedly I went through to take a closer look, but it was someone else, another older woman with very little resemblance. I woke up, but I was still dreaming, and the rest is vaguer. I was discussing with someone else the meaning of the dream. We concluded that the sadness I feel for the loss of my grandmother is not the problem. It's something else, yet to be discovered.

In the context of my self-analysis via this blog, this is very interesting. I restarted this blog because I felt I had some kind of block which I needed to assess and deal with, and a couple major things came up for me as I went through this process. Anger at my Dad, sadness at the loss of my Grandmother, heightened sensitivity to racism and injustice, and I do feel like I am making some sort of progress, like peeling back the layers of an onion. On the other hand, I kind of agree with the dream that the main block has not yet been found or dealt with, and I'm not even sure what it might be or how it should be conceptualized. The Buddhist methods for freeing your mind are different from the psychoanalytic or therapeutic approach, in the sense that when you meditate, you are not actively searching for causes. A teacher I respect, Lama Karma Chötso, put it eloquently. She said that when you are ready to deal with something, it will naturally present itself to your mind to process. My own analysis is that calm abiding meditation gives you the space to see what your mind is doing. There are also so-called Vajrayana techniques of meditation, which are more dynamic, work a lot faster, and as a result, can upend your world over and over. I suspect I am going through such a continued transition now as an outcome of Vajrayana practice. Lama Lena, another Lama who I respect deeply, has said that the aim of Vajrayana practice is to release blockages in the subtle body. These blockages restrict the flow of energy. It's a fairly uncontroversial fact that we all hold emotions in our body. Somatic meditation (body scan meditation) can help put us in tune with this. But even without that, we probably agree that tension can be carried in the shoulders, or are familiar with the sensation of "butterflies in the stomach." Emotions have a very strong somatic component, which becomes increasingly obvious as you train yourself to look for it. (I recall one vivid example of feeling jealousy as a movement of heat in my chest.) Vajrayana takes this to the extreme, and as far as I understand it, says that all of our issues arise from blockages in the subtle body.

I don't think that you can say that every blockage (or mental rut) comes from some childhood trauma, and that therefore the job of self-analysis is to root out childhood experiences. These experiences are important, and as I discovered, become irrascible when neglected, but I don't think they are the whole story or even most of it. Indeed, let's go whole hog into the Vajrayana Buddhist perspective here. According to that, the habits we've built up in this lifetime pale in comparison to what we've done in our previous infinitely many lifetimes. We've built up a lot of mental habits over the course of these lifetimes, and these ruts are very well worn. From that perspective, dealing with only the issues of this lifetime actually only scratches the surface. Looking at my own mind, I do sense a vastness and depth that seem to be too complex for one lifetime to account for. That's just an intuition.

I do feel like I'm making progress on the path, and that the dharma and my teachers are working essentially as they should. Calm abiding meditation and Vajrayana practices are quite different. In the first one, the mind is pacified by reducing outward stimulus. One makes oneself and one's environment calm. In the Vajrayana, that inner peace is cultivated in the face of an outer hurricane. Last Thursday, I chanted the Chenrezi sadhana with the local sangha, and I had the experience of having certain negative emotions amplified during the entire session, and then afterwards, they basically went away, were turned off like a switch. The interesting thing is that I watched the whole process as it happened, as if from a short distance, and it didn't bother me at all. To connect with my previous description, I felt an inner calmness, even in the face of strong(ish) emotions that would normally occupy my attention, and probably trigger a sense of shame. "I'm chanting this peaceful practice for the benefit of all sentient beings, but I can't maintain a pure attitude. Shame on me!"  It was a very interesting experience, and I think emblematic of the way Vajrayana works.

So, the takeaway message seems to be, keep doing my dharma practices, and things will unfold as they should, but probably not the way I expect them to!